Margarita’s Maiden Flight. Part II.
A bloody grave awaits me,
A grave without prayers and
no cross…
M. Yu. Lermontov.
In
Master and Margarita, Bulgakov goes
out of his way to draw the reader’s attention to the face of the fat man,
framed by small sideburns... no, not the Nozdrev type of sideburns, as he is so
adamant to point out to the artist who has painted a portrait of Pushkin with
“a ruffian’s eyes.”
Bulgakov
hints that the Backenbarter is Koroviev by using the word “Yenisei.” I have already written about Pushkin’s friendship with
the Decembrists. Following their failed 1825 uprising, some of them were exiled
to the Yenisei-River area of Siberia. This explains why our ‘Backenbarter’ was
so drunk that even the river in the place where he had been bathing reeked of
cognac. Previously, he could not stop himself from flying to the Yenisei to
raise a few glasses to their memory.
The
nonsense about the “Bloody Wedding” of his Parisian friend Guissard, is
easy to explain. There were many poets among the Decembrists, and Pushkin was
of course a poet par excellence. Now, Guissard lived in Pushkin’s time, and he
is noted for having compiled an anthology of French poets. (Don’t ask me what
French poets have to do with Russian poets. Poets
of the world, unite!)
Incidentally,
the fairly well-known play Bloody Wedding
(the only one having such a name) was written by the Spanish poet and
playwright Federico Garcia Lorca in the 1930’s. It portrays a love triangle, in
which both the husband and the lover die at each other’s hand. To relate the
storyline to Pushkin’s life would be to stretch it quite a bit. D’Anthes in
pursuing Pushkin’s wife Natalia Goncharova may have received flirting in
response, but anything more serious seems very unlikely. It was however in
defense of his wife’s honor that Pushkin fought D’Anthes in a duel, and died as
a result of it. It is very possible that Bulgakov mentions the Bloody Wedding in association with the Bloody Sunday, a real tragic event
(1905) in Russian history. But in conformity with his peculiar treatment of
reality and an eerie sense of humor, what Bulgakov may refer to here, as Bloody Wedding, was the Decembrist
revolt of 1825, in which just one shot was fired by the rebellious officers,
killing the immensely popular Governor-General of Moscow Miloradovich, who was
peaceably trying to bring the rebels to their senses. As a result of this failed
rebellion five main conspirators were hanged, which was a dishonorable way to
die for military officers, as opposed to the firing squad. The rest of them
were effectively deprived of their lives too, having been sentenced to hard
labor and lifelong exile to Siberia. (In a display of supreme love and heroism,
the wives of the Decembrists followed their husbands to extreme hardship, which
they swore to share with their loved ones.)
And
one more thing. Curiously, when Koroviev laments: “And if truth be told, I would much rather be
chopping wood than receiving them [the guests-dusts at Woland’s Ball] here on
this landing…”, it is precisely these words that prove that,
according to Bulgakov, Pushkin must have regretted that instead of having been
exiled to “Yenisei,” that is, to Siberia, with his friends the Decembrists, he
had been reduced to attending balls and eventually ignominiously perished at
the hand of a court gigolo…
…As
for the circumstances of the Bloody
Sunday of 1905 in St. Petersburg, this time it wasn’t the members of high
nobility who came out into the Senate Square, but thousands of Russian workers
with their families all carrying church banners and icons, dressed in their
best Sunday clothes, intending to petition the tsar about their grievances and
having no violence in mind. They were met by the armed troops and lethal fire.
Many were killed in this heavily one-sided slaughter.
What
else formed the connective tissue between these two events? Two Russian tsars
hated by Bulgakov--- both Nicholases. Nicholas I [Palkin] celebrated his coming
to power by his suppression of the Decembrist revolt, which called for the
abolition of autocracy and establishment of constitutional monarchy. Bulgakov
also sees him morally guilty of the death of Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin. (He
presented his sharply negative version of the tsar’s role in the poet’s death
in his play Alexander Pushkin.)
As
for Nicholas II, he is obviously has the tragedy of the Bloody Sunday 1905 on his conscience, where at least two hundred,
and probably more, peaceful civilians were shot to death, and many hundreds
more were wounded. I t was that selfsame Nicholas II who was later executed
with his wife and all his children by the Bolsheviks. His worst transgression,
though, was his treacherous 1917 abdication of the throne, plunging Russia
first into a caricature government, and next into lawlessness and chaos, all
because the Russian military corps thus lost its head and cause. (Bulgakov
shows this event allegorically through the chess game of Begemot and Woland.)
Connecting
these two tsars Nicholas I and Nicholas II, and the tragic events associated
with their respective reigns, Bulgakov poses the sharp question, which he
instantly answers himself in White Guard:
“Will somebody
pay for the blood? No, no one.”
(To
be continued…)
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